This invention relates to an apparatus for the insertion and removal of contact lenses; particularly soft contact lenses. As is well known in the contact lens art, proper care of contact lenses includes the insertion and removal of the lenses without risking contamination by foreign substances such as those carried by the fingers of the person inserting the lenses. In order to provide such care, numerous contact lens insertion devices have been developed in the past. Examples of such devices include:
______________________________________ U.S. Date of Pat. Nos. Issue Inventor Title ______________________________________ 4,093,291 6/6/78 Herbert L. Schurgin Contact lens Application and Removal instrument 4,088,359 5/9/78 Richard S. Buchanan, Contact lens Jr. Inserter 4,082,339 4/4/78 Joseph Roth Soft contact lens Insertion and removal Instrument 3,628,824 12/21/71 David Leuw Implement for grasping Small objects 3,177,874 4/13/65 J. D. Spriggs Contact lens Applicator 3,115,360 12/24/63 R. S. Witcoff Resilient gripping Device 2,406,393 8/27/46 E. A. Neugass Tweezer imple- ment and the like 1,250,422 12/18/17 G. J. Bohlman Paper tong 987,173 3/21/11 F. Sale Nippers ______________________________________
While several of these devices can be used to remove a contact lens from the eye, none of them are particularly designed to utilize a pair of lens gripping members to engage, flex, hold and remove soft contact lens from the eye.
For example, it has been found in the past that suction cups are not useful in removing soft contact lenses because they tend to pull the lens away from the eye rather than releasing the surface tension between the lens and the lacrymal fluid of the eye. As a result, corneal cells may be damaged.
It has also been found that the cornea is too sensitive in the majority of cases to allow removal of the lens without increasing the possibility of causing injury, however slight, to the eye. Therefore, it is now common procedure to move the lens to the scleral portion of the eye. A problem exists, however, in that the user then does not have clear vision needed to remove the lens once the lens is moved to the sclera.
Further complications arise when fingers are used to remove the lens from the eye. For example, long fingernails tend to scratch the eye; users with rough fingers tend to injure the eye and/or abrade the lens, and in some cases the fingers may be too large for sufficient dexterity to remove the lens. A consummate problem is the lack of cleanliness of fingers, which tends to contaminate the lens.
An additional problem with most contact lens insertion devices is that they do not facilitate kinesthesis (the sense whose end organs lie in the muscles, tendons and joints and are stimulated by bodily movements and tensions; the muscle sense); Webster's New International Dictionary, 2nd Edition. In other words, most of these devices do not allow an accurate perception of where the lens is in relationship to the eye. Such perception is in addition to visual perception of the position of the lens in relation to the eye.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a device for insertion and removal of soft contact lenses from the eye of the user in which the suction between the lens and the eye may be broken, and the lens thereby easily removed from the eye;
to provide such devices in a form which is easy and inexpensive to manufacture;
to provide such devices from a material which is soft so as not to injure the eye and sterilizable so as not to contaminate the lens; and
to provide a device which tends to maximize kinesthesis during insertion and removal of the lens from the eye.